The Conservative manifesto reaffirmed a commitment to cut net migration to less than 100,000 a year. Employers will have to pay a £2,000 levy to hire a skilled worker from abroad, and an end to freedom of movement from the EU will ultimately make it difficult to recruit skilled and unskilled labour from any other country. The target is arbitrary, costly and an act of economic self-harm, says Rachel Marangozov. It will worsen the recruitment crisis in the NHS at a time when the UK is close to full employment.
When most targets are repeatedly missed, there is usually cause for a rethink – or, at the very least, a pause, particularly when that target has been an arbitrary one and lacked a clear rationale.
Not so, it seems with the government’s net migration target, which has been reaffirmed in the Conservative manifesto with as much enthusiasm as when it was first announced. Having consistently failed to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands for the past six years, the government believes that this has simply made the target more necessary than ever.
But pursuing it will come at a cost.

Key sectors in our economy are dependent on skilled migration and would struggle to find UK workers with equivalent skills. For example, around 8% of those working in the IT, software and computer services are non-EU migrants, and around 7% of all those working in banking and financial services are EU migrants. Not withstanding the need to upskill British workers to take up these roles in the future, it is clear that this won’t happen overnight. It takes time. And in the meantime, vital sectors of our economy, such as higher education and IT, will pay a higher levy to recruit skilled workers from abroad. The cost to a small business or even a large university of having to pay £2,000 for every skilled worker it needs, whether they are Indian IT workers or US professors, will only be seen as punitive. Employers already have to pass the Resident Labour market test before recruiting skilled migrants from abroad, demonstrating that no UK workers could be found for the vacancy.
Even in low-paid sectors, such as hospitality and agriculture, the economic costs of reducing net migration are significant. For example, 10% of all workers in manufacturing and 14% of all workers in accommodation and food service are from the EU. Importantly, these workers are not as disposable as some politicians like to make out. Our tight labour market and record levels of employment mean that there simply aren’t hoards of jobless Brits queuing to take up these jobs.
There are costs to our public services too – not least the NHS, which is heavily dependent on skilled migration and already overstretched. Even if an NHS trust were able to pay £2,000 for each of its Filipino or Indian nurses, it is unlikely that that money would then go into reinstating nursing bursaries to grow a domestic workforce of British workers. And even if it did, what are NHS trusts supposed to do in the 3-4 years it takes to train these new recruits? In previous years we have been able to go to Europe to source doctors and nurses as immigration rules on non-EU migrants have tightened. But Brexit will put an end to this.
The government has hinted at a transitional period, post-Brexit, that could help mitigate an imminent shortage of EU workers in key sectors like the NHS. They have also suggested that some sectors, such as agriculture, will continue to access the labour they need, perhaps through some preferential migration regime for EU nationals or short term /seasonal visas. But Brexit negotiations have barely begun, and neither plan would reduce net migration to the tens of thousands.
Indeed, it is highly questionable whether the target is achievable at all, even if we see an end to free movement. In the year to September 2016, immigration was an estimated 596,000; shaving an estimated 100,000 students off this and even the 268,000 EU migrants that we saw in that period would still leave 257,000 non-EU migrants and 71,000 British citizens. With 323,000 emigrants, that still leaves net migration well above the tens of thousands. And any cuts to non-EU migration could well be cancelled out by looser visa restrictions that accompany potential trade deals with countries like Australia and India.
The preoccupation with numbers overshadows the more important question of whether the target is even desirable. There are the financial and administrative burdens to business and the Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated that hitting the net migration target by 2021 would cost about £6bn a year.
This is a target that yields no winners. If it is reached, it will constitute an act of economic self harm; if it is missed again, it will further undermine public confidence in the government’s ability to manage migration effectively, and will encourage popular resentment towards migrants.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Brexit blog, nor the LSE.
Rachel Marangozov is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies and a Fellow at the LSE.
Also by this author: How will Brexit affect the NHS? The English trusts that depend most on EU nurses
No, it isn’t. The Tories expect to gain from it; it is the rest of us who will lose. The Tories are never “us”, always “them”.
The reason we have the skills deficit we do, is that rather than training our own citizens employers (including state services such as the NHS) have found it easier and cheaper to recruit rom abroad, whether or not it is, or is not, from the EU is irrelevant.
Many, if not the majority, of the skilled people come to the UK for the money and are from poor countries and this drain of skilled people on those countries helps perpetuate their economic status.
Low skilled people are also here to earn and many send as much as possible home to support their families, these people tend to live as cheaply as possible and work for the sorts of salaries that UK citizens cannot afford to live on.
If employers want to recruit skilled (or unskilled) people then they should pay for the administration costs.
The current administration is right to try and manage immigration into the country and to keep it as low as possible. The only people migrating to this country should be the ones whose presence here is of benefit to the country.
This fails to distinguish between Myth and Reality. Practically anybody with any sense knows that the target figure for net immigration into the UK can never be met, even if the UK leaves the EU.
However arguing over this figure is a polite way of “keeping those nasty foreigners out”. In today’s world no politician dare use the language of Enoch Powell forty years ago. Using the coda of “immigration figures” is a convenient cover for nasty attacks on “foreigners” of any description.
Oh please, not that tired old line whereby any discussion of inward migration is code for hatred of foreigners.
“The cost to a small business or even a large university of having to pay £2,000 for every skilled worker it needs, whether they are Indian IT workers or US professors, will only be seen as punitive.”
Only to the dimmest – for anyone else, a one-off hiring cost of less than 10% of the first year’s employment cost is trivial. You don’t get “skilled workers” from another continent by sticking a notice in the corner shop window! (I don’t have the figures handy, but my company certainly paid many hundreds, quite possibly over the £2k mark in total, to employ a Chinese graduate who had just earned her PhD. Then had to write to the Home Office to explain that a PhD is not, in fact, a “philosophy degree”, since they couldn’t understand why someone with a PhD in engineering had a job offer from an engineering company… A £2k visa fee wouldn’t have mattered.)
“They have also suggested that some sectors, such as agriculture, will continue to access the labour they need, perhaps through some preferential migration regime for EU nationals or short term /seasonal visas. But Brexit negotiations have barely begun, and neither plan would reduce net migration to the tens of thousands.”
Not if seasonal agricultural workers don’t count towards “net migration” – which they wouldn’t, because (unlike EU immigrants, with automatic open-ended residence) they’d be leaving again within months. The latter option would certainly reduce the “net migration” numbers, as well as being fairer than the former.
The 100k target is probably too low for our current economic situation, but a £2000 levy is no disaster – nor is reducing unskilled immigration a bit: wages at the bottom have barely kept pace with inflation for the last decade, no doubt influenced by an influx from Eastern Europe. Cutting back a bit on that is probably beneficial overall to both the UK and the other countries involved.
“September 2016, immigration was an estimated 596,000; shaving an estimated 100,000 students off this and even the 268,000 EU migrants that we saw in that period would still leave 257,000 non-EU migrants and 71,000 British citizens”
Net migration being reduced to tens of thousands is achievable. 268,000 EU migrants in 27 countries is ridiculously high considering Europe has 50 countries and when compared to 257,000 non-EU migrants cover in the span of the entire world.
Why should the UK be forced to intake more EU migrants generally fall under the low-skilled / unskilled category over highly skilled / skilled non-EU migrants ?
As it is exam season …
1. “Is all immigration a benefit?” discuss with reference to the immigration of Polish workers to work at the Sports direct warehouse in Shirebrook.
2. Discuss definitions of Full employment with specific regard to the role of working tax credits in subsiding employment that would otherwise be not economically viable, the downward pressure observed on wages recently. Consider whether, given the ease with which workers can move around the EU, full employment within one nation can ever be said to have been achieved until all nations have full employment.
3. The European commission report on Ageing in 2013 forecast that by the middle of the century Sweden’s population would have grown by 36%, the UK’s by 25%, Belgium’s by 37%, but Germany’s population would have reduced by 13%, Lithuania by 40%, Greece by 20%. Are large scale population swaps between the nations of the EU a sign of success or failure?
Dipper.It looks to be all pea and thimble work by the corporate people who control government.In some ways, there is the same result for the countries without the EU who are providing refugees for the EU to de-stabilise European society and the flow of legal economic migrants from poorly performing EU member states, and effectively failed states such as Greece, to the well-organised member nation-states in the north-west of Europe.It is the kind of moverment initiated by Western powers de-stabilising weak nation-states, facilitated and encouraged by interests whose aim is to overthrow the well-run democracies in the West with a view to undermine functioning democracy and the independence of nation-states vis-a-vis globalising corporates.Weak nation-states are open to exploitation by international high finance and the general run of the mill military, industrial, media and psycho-op operators based in the West.
It is up to the peoples of Europe to figure out what they want for a future and how to achieve it.Just now they are still sitting ducks being herded into a globalising corporate enclosure.
Dipper – Anyone who answered:
1. Yes, they are doing the jobs Brits will not do.
2. Freedom of movement within the EU is of benefit to everyone involved, inward migration is all beneficial and what has wage suppression and full employment got to do with anything?
3. Undoubtedly a success
(or variations thereof)
Would pass with flying colours and anyone who answered differently would be given the opportunity to resit the exam until they gave the correct answers.